Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber (Liveright)

In the winter evenings of 1861, while his wife lay recovering from smallpox, Marx relaxed by comparing the figures in Appian’s history of the Roman civil wars with modern European politicians. Unlike Marx, Sperber prefers a firmly historicist approach, and attempts, by viewing his subject purely in the context of the times, to show us a quintessentially “nineteenth-century life.” He tracks the “swarthy” Hegelian from his university life in Berlin, where he ran “wild in the scholars’ night-gown and with uncombed hair,” to his emergence as an anti-Prussian polemicist, exiled in Paris, Brussels, and, finally, London. Occasionally, Sperber’s zeal to identify every conceivable contemporary influence, however slight, on Marx’s thought risks tiring even the most dedicated reader. But Sperber’s rigor also yields gems, as when he deduces that the Marxes must have conceived their first child in the summer of 1843, while on a visit to Marx’s mother-in-law. ♦